For the political class in the UK, Brexit has become an all-consuming obsession, sucking the oxygen out of virtually everything else. Yet for the EU’s high command in Berlin, Brussels, and Paris, it is but one of a multitude of crises, and, despite the importance we attach to it, far from the most significant of them.

Most of these crises, including Brexit, might, on the other hand, be said to have a common cause – Europe’s reckless and deeply divisive rush to monetary union. From the start, the single currency was a classic case of attempting to run before learning to walk, or as the Telegraph put it in a leader at the time of Maastricht, it piled “Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa”.